Post navigation

In our present place and time, the ‘machine’ has become so much a part of our lives.

Marx says:

It is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it… The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself (Marx in Seidman 1983: 137)

Reflections on the machine from the present

Amongst the affluent (with entry barriers ever-lowering) we have not just the machine of the workplace but the machine of leisure. This machinery is not forced upon us by necessity but is chosen. Elsewhere, the machinery of the assembly line plods on, as inane as ever it was.

Friedrich von Hayek’s ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’ (1949) appears to be an important work, for perhaps almost all libertarian/free-market think tanks lead back to it. The spirit of the essay, which was written in response to the great flurry of postwar social planning, runs warm in Australia’s own Institute for Public Affairs (IPA): the defence of free-market ideas in principle rather than via pragmatics.

It is also insightful beyond its immediate (ideological) aims.

It covers the following:

Intellectuals have more power than they are given credit

For this greason socialism – or rather, the principles of planned economy – had become a dominant in public policy

But why are intellectuals, above all the brightest ones, so attracted to socialism? Because socialism espouses a visionary utopian existence which inspires, whereas liberal thinkers tend to fixate on more mundane practicalities of the present

In conclusion, liberalism needs its own inspiring visionary thinkers

What is an intellectual?

For Hayek the class of intellectuals is broad. These ‘professional secondhand dealers in ideas’ are the consumers, synthesisers, and above all disseminators of ideas and conceptual frameworks. It is a class composed of the literate and educated: teachers, academics, and journalists, but also scientists and doctors.

Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch is a second wave feminist classic. A Post Freudian account which argues that the development of a ‘female libido’ is the key to social liberation.

What insights does this iconoclastic work have to shine on the present?

As the prologue lays it out, the earlier – suffragette – wave of feminists had fought hard for civil rights of participation equal to those of men, and, according to Germaine, had largely won them, opening to women a world of possibility (equal access to the ‘ulcer and coronary’). And yet, this is still a ‘man’s world’ of hierarchical order and success or failure through competition and strain. She argues, therefore that fewer women than expected have chosen to enjoy such a ‘privilege’.

This is very different starting point to the contemporary focus on “patriarchy”, which it is said, either excludes or exploits women’s participation in society; but for Germaine, the reluctance of women to participate suggests a glimmer of hope for an alternative form of existence. It was the ‘chief function’ of this book to suggest a way to the alternative.

The word hypocrisy originates from Greek compounds hypokrites, hypokrisis, which relate to an actor playing a part on the stage1(actor, pretender, dissembler) . The word we’ve received is a metaphor intermingled with a religious-moralistic hue.

The Hippocratic oath also emerges form these roots. Presumably Hippocrates’ had an ancestral connection with drama.

Hypokrites

Even Jesus, patron saint of turning-the-other-cheek, had nothing nice to say about the Pharisees. For their entrenched cultural or racial predilection toward hypocrisy he tarred the whole group with invective. In contemporary times this would be considered scandalous. But there are no records of cries of “not all Pharisees!”.

Thus hypocrisy is considered one of the worst of human failings.

Below is a short thesis, written as a counterpoint to the view of hypocrisy, which Jesus, Mohammed, and so many more of us seem to hold (if less rigidly), the view that hypocrisy prevents moral progress in human affairs: Hypocrisy enables vice at the expense of virtue.

This attitude is based on the lofty ideal, that acting virtuously in all our activities, even in private doing what was right, works to make the world a better place.

But what about the possibility that hypocrisy serves a positive function for civilisation?

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ – George Santayana

The high importance placed upon ‘the private’, our increased links to one another via the internet, and the power of the same tech to capture and catalogue personal data ensures that debates about the future of privacy are frequent. The concern in Australia about the ABS retaining personal identification data in the Census (for a longer period) being only the latest to cause a panic.

The internet first broadened expectations for privacy as the greater world became accessible from the bedroom, but the undertow now threatens to drag the bedroom (and beyond) back into the public.

A major motivation of ardent defenders of privacy, typified by Edward Snowden, is the concern that the past, or present will be used against them at some stage in the future. For this reason they feel that their freedom to speak and think freely, now, is encroached upon.

These considerations are significant, but so much of the concern about privacy is fixated on variations of this same theme. In this essay I consider another dimension: privacy not to protect what we have done but privacy for the protection of what we will do, who we will be (and who we are).

Consilience was proposed by William Whewell (1794-1866), alongside prediction and coherence, as one standard a scientific theory needs to meet to be considered verified.

“Science doesn’t work by plebiscite, by sheer numbers, but it does work by something called consilience. Consilience is something that goes back to William Whewell at Cambridge; where you have a great number of sources of different evidence … dozens of different inputs together building up a picture of what’s going on.” ((11:43-12:07) ‘The Science Show’)

Hearing the above on the radio I began to wonder about the relation between the concept of consilience and the much more common use of ‘consensus’ (as in scientific consensus).

What is consilience?

Consilience is achieved when evidence from multiple sources converge to validate a single scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is verified to the extent that it confirms (and is confirmed) by inductions drawn from different kinds of phenomenon. An example of consilience in its strongest sense is Newton’s theory of why planets (what we would now call moons) orbit around Jupiter rather than travelling in a straight line. Newton’s theory achieved consilience because it was also able to explain other phenomenon such as falling bodies and the tidal movements – hence what might have been known as the ‘law of orbiting planets’ became the law of gravity.

Consilience does not imply that the actual phenomenon being confirmed is stronger or more serious but that it has greater credibility as truth (I write this remark as a sort-of prolegomenon toward some remarks on consilience in sociology). In the strongest case of consilience the supporting evidence makes the claim stronger and all instances become subsumed under a more general rule.

Consilience or Consensus?

One often hears “scientific consensus”, rather than consilience, used to describe ‘things that science agrees on’ . Consensus bears the connotation that scientists rather than the science have been the determining factor in deciding ‘truth’. As such the use of this phrase has led to considerable criticism: science as an institution, as process, or as body of knowledge, doesn’t and literally cannot concede.

To what extent, can controversies attracting the ‘scientific consensus’ phrase (e.g. Climate Change) be accurately classified as having achieved consilience? That is, to what extent is the ‘scientific consensus’ really scientific?

The majority of climate science converges upon a point – the typical figure used to defend the ‘scientific consensus’ is that 97% of climate scientists agree that greenhouses gases are the major factor leading to the rise of temperature.

The central element which underlies the ‘majority’ climate science is that greenhouse gases have historically been strongly correlated with temperature rise. This correlation has been confirmed from multiple sources, and based on what is known of particle physics a causal link is drawn between these two phenomenon – thus this hypothesis has consilience. Yet despite this, consensus, at least as it is used in the 97% ‘meta-study’ case and others like it (see the wiki) might still be the best word to use: the consensus of expert opinion, not the consilience of science.

These meta-reviews (i.e. studies of studies) report the number of science articles that take the position that climate change is significantly human-caused (a further analysis is conducted on only those articles which are written by influential experts of the field). There is a certain authority (institutional authority) to these articles by virtue of the fact that they have been peer-reviewed. Yet, even if a particular science article cites the connection between green-house gases and warming, it need not verify this with new research (as a consilience of inductions). Instead, it might begin with this connection as a premise, reporting its own scientific findings atop this assumption – think of a scientist who, in order to stress the significance and relevance of their work, prefaces their discussion about the severity of potential future weather events with brief review of the literature about the seriousness of human induced climate change, they would be classed as one of the 97% despite their actual paper contributing nothing to the causal assumptions about the roots of climate change.

These statements are not meant to stoke scepticism of human-induced climate change, only to emphasise that a proportion of the 97% ‘consensus’ figure is likely to based on papers which do not undertake elemental climate science, and that such consensus is, then, consensus of scientists after all. The clincher is that this consensus of experts relies on the fundamental claims already having achieved consilience.

The Consilience (or consensus) and its “enemies”?

Michael Shermer has written on this topic and may have been a source of inspiration for The Science Show’s recent remarks. On his blog he writes “as Albert Einstein said in response to a 1931 book skeptical of relativity theory entitled 100 Authors against Einstein, “Why 100? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”.

At first Einstein was indeed considered wrong. It was only in time, as its predictions were verified that the theory of general relativity, in the main, usurped physics from Newton.

Einstein’s theory has long since achieved consilience and continues to predict hitherto unobserved phenomenon – most recently gravity waves 1A major achievement according Whewell’s philosophy of science; he believed that it is greater that scientific theory predicts/explains what was previously unobserved (new facts) rather than what was already known. But it does not follow that Newton’s theory was without basis. Newton’s theory was well established, with a history of correct predictions. Einstein’s theory, however, proved to be slightly more accurate.

Consilience and consensus can be over-turned, then, but only should the new theory prove superior on all, or almost all, accounts. That means that, generally, the new theory will be consistent with earlier empirical observations and confirm the predictions of the theory it hopes to surpass. In other words, the critics of Einstein or climate change have a lot of work to do.

Now what about the role of consensus and consilience in the social sciences? (My original motive for beginning this piece)

A confluence of factors has led ‘domestic violence’ and ‘violence against women’ to be placed high on the public and governmental agenda. The critique of “patriarchy” and the assertion of an almost metaphysical connection between deep culture and violence provides the theoretical backbone of this agenda. It is in this context that Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things received the Stella prize earlier this year (the title of the book refers to the media’s portrayal of violence against women).

This is a book of exquisite earthy prose which chronicles the experience of two women (Verla and Yolanda) amongst half a dozen or so other women, who, having been swindled and drugged, are plunged into a nightmarish boot-camp, a remote and expansive bowl of earth surrounded by a 6 metre high electrified fence. The reason for internment is that each has been involved in behaviours deemed inappropriate by the lights of ‘society’; sexual behaviours, ranging from affairs with politicians, to sleeping with a talent show host, a football team. Continue reading →

I have been absent for a while but have been strong-armed back by the appearance of Iain Walker on the ABC’s Qanda political debate program tonight (Question and Answer). I don’t know much about Iain Walker so I’m not plugging him, other than to say that he runs a foundation called newDEMOCRACY which has proposed a ‘citizen senate’, something along the lines of an idea I have been mulling over for the last month and a half. I post some brief details below.

The question is whether democracy could be improved by greater representation from ‘ordinary’ people. Australia’s present political landscape features one peculiarity which suggests (by sheer fluke) that this may credible: due to Australia’s fairly unique ‘preferential’ voting system and the large number of candidates that can run for election to the Senate we have seen the election of a number of relatively ‘ordinary’ Australians who quickly developed their ability and taken their job with seriousness. Continue reading →

One of the themes of Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaption of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (a film I recently watched) is, about a perceived conflict between the liberty of the individual and the integrity of society. We can also turn to the story and to one scene in particular, and find a good parallel to the question of whether the marriage of non-heterosexual couples should be legally recognised: the issue of ‘gay marriage’/ ‘marriage equality’.

Camus is one of my favourite public figures of conscience. Visconti’s Lo Stranero is a very faithful adaptation. His interpretation of Meursault as a benign sensualist is sound; and if anything the film is perhaps too faithful1Camus’ estate placed limits on artistic licence and selected the script writer; and in several scenes of the film Meursault narrates lines directly from the book which are jarringly flowery coming from the voice of the film’s typically direct and concise character.

This is the story of the trial-by-character of the Algerian Frenchman, Meursault who inexplicably kills an Arab on a beach in Algiers. Many have read The Stranger during a ‘coming of age’ period of their lives where they appreciate the social rebellion embodied in Mersaults’ apparent amorality, yet, as one of those amorphous stories that can be seen from a different light when read again, today I will be exploring it in parallel to contemporary debates about marriage.

Carol Rovane from Columbia University recently proposed a way of thinking about ethical relativism; a method to potentially avoid concluding, as Max Weber famously did1New Footnote Code: Max Weber can probably be considered an ‘individualist relativist’ – though his ideas are a little more complicated: in theory one can believe whatever they wish (though culture certainly limits these beliefs in strong ways!), yet, his writings suggest that in order for one to have dignity they will need to (ought to?) follow to their beliefs rigidly. Ethics may be relative to personal ideals and inclinations, but dignity (external or internal?) is a manifest character of those who conform to their beliefs., that disagreements between competing ethical values are ’irresoluble’. Here in Part One I will outline Carol’s position; Part Two will analyse it in more detail and explore some interesting problems.

Carol’s Relativism

Ethical relativist positions are founded upon the belief that values are not universal but are relative to some criteria. Carol’s proposal is a type of cultural relativism which renounces universal, absolute values but still claims to allow for objective criticism within and between divergent ethics. Her argument is that ethical values are grounded on principles embedded in culture. Values or actions are objectively right or wrong relative to these cultural principles; therefore, though another person’s moral decisions may differ from her own, Carol maintains that it is not a contradiction to believe that both they and she can be right.